While he was in the hospital, the Appropriations bill for these three institutes came
to the floor of the Senate. Florence Mahoney and I were determined that additional
funds should be voted for the institutes and we asked Charles Murray, Senator
Murray's son, to organize a floor fight. He got about 24 or 25 Senators to sponsor an
amendment to the Appropriations bill.

Now, this was very hard to do because the Appropriations Committee hates to have
people interfering with their decisions, and they do everything they can to fight
against amendments coming from Senators not on the Committee.

Q:

Charles Murray, was he the administrative assistant...

Lasker:

Of his father, yes.

Senator Pepper took the lead in the fight, as did Magnusson and Senator Murray and
Senator Neeley. Their first try was for 64 million additional appropriations for
these three institutes. This failed. The next day they brought up an amendmentfor 32
million. It was a Friday and many of our friends had gone home for the weekend, so we
lost again. Five more votes would have gotten us this additional 32 million dollars.
I was on the telephone constantly with Florence Mahoney and Mike Gorman, who had come
to Washington to do a job on this, as I was determined that we should make a fight
and I was unable to be in Washington myself because of Albert's illness.